Business continuity and disaster recovery refers to the capability to restore normal (or near-normal) business operations, from a critical business application perspective, after the occurrence of a disaster that interrupts business operations. Business continuity and disaster recovery may require the ability to bring up mission-critical applications and the data these applications depend on and make them available to users as quickly as business requirements dictate. In cases where downtime is costly, the process will likely involve automation. For mission-critical applications that demand minimal downtime, the disaster recovery process may need to be highly automated and resilient. Clustering technologies may provide such highly automated and resilient disaster recovery.
Clusters may include multiple systems connected in various combinations to shared storage devices. Cluster server software may monitor and control applications running in the cluster and may restart applications in response to a variety of hardware or software faults. Unfortunately, many applications may not be configured to run in a cluster environment. What is needed, therefore, is a mechanism for extending clustering technologies to software applications that may not be cluster-aware.